Full-time Professors (Biomedicine)-Department of Life Sciences, NCU

1. Position: Assistant Professor
2. Education:
1. Ph.D. 2002-2009 Department of Ecology and Evolution, SUNY at Stony Brook (Stony Brook University), New York, USA
2. M.S. 1997-1999 Institute of Plant Pathology and Entomology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
3. B. S. 1993-1997 Department of Plant Pathology and Entomology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
3. Professional Experience:
   1. 2015-present     Assistant Professor    Department of Life Sciences, National Central University, Taoyun City, Taiwan
   2. 2014-2015 Postdoctoral Associate       Department of Biology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA
   3. 2009-2014 Postdoctoral Scholar Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UC Irvine, Irvine, California, USA
   4. 2001-2002 Ph.D. student (no degree awarded)  Department of Life Sciences, Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu City, Taiwan
   5. 1999-2001 Research Assistant     Institute of Molecular Biology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
4. Contact:886-3-422-7151 ext 65082
5. FAX:(03) 422-8482
6. E-mail:shudanyeh@cc.ncu.edu.tw

Various degrees of male-specific wing pigmentation, named wing spots, appear in the lineage of the oriental Drosophila melanogaster species group. In the species with male-specific wing spots, a male circles around a female and display both wings in front of the female, named wing display, during courtship. These two traits, wing spots and wing display, are either both present in a species or both absent in another species (Fig. 1).  By using wing micro-surgery and mating choice test, we found the female in wing-spot-bearing species use wing spots as a visual cue to assess males who are pursuing her. In the results of quantitative trait locus mapping (QTL mapping), we found the major locus responsible for wing spot formation is overlap to the locus responsible for wing display. This suggests that either closely- linked or pleiotropic genetic factors may be responsible for these two traits (See Yeh et al., 2006 Heredity; Yeh and True, 2014 G3). The low resolution of QTL and high degree of rearrangements between genome of the species pair, D. elegans and D. gunungcola, for our QTL analysis and genome of well-studied species, D. melanogaster, make further genetic dissection difficult. Thus, we plan to investigate the transcriptome of wings and adult brains at several developmental stages in wing-spot-bearing species and spotless species.

Fig. 1. The evolution of wing spot and wing display. On the left represents the presence of wing spot and examples of wing spots in the D. melanogaster species group. Top right represents a D. elegans male showing both wings to a female (photo taken in Chiayi County, Taiwan by S.-D. Yeh). Bottom right shows the appearance of two crossable species used in QTL mapping.

The variation and divergence of body color and the pleiotropic effects of its underlying genetic pathway— The multifunction nature of melanin biosynthetic pathway makes this pathway intriguingly participate in the adaptation of multiple ecological factors. We explore the pleiotropic effects of this pathway to organismal evolution in the exclusive geographical distribution of two body color morphs in D. elegans in South-East Asia, from behavioral, physiological, and morphological aspects, in the questions of how and why the geographical pattern of body color formed.  

(Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=eT0-xbEAAAAJ)

Genetic mechanisms in morphological divergence in Drosophila elegans species subgroup (ongoing projects)

1. Yeh, Shu-Dan and John R. True. 2014. The genetic architecture of coordinately evolving male wing pigmentation and courtship behavior in Drosophila elegans and Drosophila gunungcola. Genes, Genomes, Genetics 4(11): 2079-2093.
2. Yeh, Shu-Dan, Shain-Ren Liou and John R. True. 2006. Genetics of divergence in male wing pigmentation and courtship behavior between Drosophila elegans and D. gunungcola. Heredity 96(5): 383-395
3. Prud'homme, Benjamin, Nicolas Gompel, Antonis Rokas, Victoria A. Kassner, Thomas M. Williams, Shu-Dan Yeh, John R. True, and Sean B. Carroll. 2006. Repeated morphological evolution through cis-regulatory changes in a pleiotropic gene. Nature 440: 1050-1053

Genome evolution in Drosophila melanogaster (collaboration with Ranz lab in UCI)

1. Vivek Jayaswal, Jamie Jimenez, Robert Magie, Kien Nguyen, Bryan Clifton, Shudan Yeh, José M Ranz. 2018. A species‐specific multigene family mediates differential sperm displacement in Drosophila melanogaster. Evolution 72(2): 399-403
   
2. Clifton, Bryan D., Pablo Librado, Shu-Dan Yeh, Edwin S. Solares, Daphne A. Real, Suvini U. Jayasekera, Wanting Zhang, Mijuan Shi, Ronni V. Park, Robert D. Magie, Hsiu-Ching Ma, Xiao-Qin Xia, Antonio Marco, Julio Rozas, Jose M. Ranz. 2017. Rapid functional and sequence differentiation of a tandemly repeated species-specific multigene family in Drosophila. Molecular Biology and Evolution 34: 51-65.
   
3. Yeh, Shu-Dan, Marin von Grotthuss, Kania A. Gandasetiawan, Suvini Jayasekera, Xiao-Qin Xia, Carolus Chan,Vivek Jayaswal, and José M. Ranz.2014. Functional divergence of miRNA transcriptome at the onset of Drosophila metamorphosis. Molecular Biology and Evolution 31(10): 2557-2572.
4. Yeh, Shu-Dan, Tiffanie Do, Carolus Chan, Adriana Cordove, Francisco Carranza, Eugene A. Yamamota, Mashya Abbassi, Kania A. Gandasetiawan, Pablo Librado, Elisabetta Damia, Patrizio Dimitri, Julio Rozas, Daniel L. Hartl, John Roote, and José M. Ranz. 2012. Functional evidence that a recently evolved Drosophila sperm-specific gene boosts sperm competition.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(6): 2043-2048 
5. Yeh, Shu-Dan, Tiffanie Do, Mashya Abbassi, and José M. Ranz. 2012. Functional relevance of the newly evolved sperm dynein intermediate chain multigene family in Drosophila melanogaster males. Communicative & Integrative Biology 5: 462-465.

Population genomics in Caenorhabditis elegans (collaboration with Baer lab in UF)

1. Ayush Shekhar Saxena, Matthew P. Salomon, Chikako Matshuba, Shu-Dan Yeh, and Charles F. Baer. 2019. Evolution of the mutational process under relaxed selection in Caenorhabditis elegans. Molecular Biology and Evolution 36: 239-251.
   
2. Shu-Dan Yeh, Ayush Saxena, Timothy Crombie, Dorian Feistel, Lindsay M. Johnson, Isabel Lam, Jennifer Lam, Sayran Saber, and Charles F. Baer. 2018. The mutational decay of male-male and hermaphrodite-hermaphrodite competitive fitness in the androdioecious nematode C. elegans. Heredity 120:1-12.

Others

1. Yeh, Shu-Dan, Carolus Chan, José M. Ranz. 2013. Assessing differences in sperm competitive ability in Drosophila. Journal of Visualized Experiments (78): e50547, doi:10.3791/50547.
2. True, John R., Shu-Dan Yeh, Bernhard T. Hovemann, Tobias Kemme, Ian A. Meinertzhagen, Tara N. Edwards, Shia-Ren Liou, Qian Han, and Jianyong Li. 2005. Drosophila tan encodes a novel hydrolase required in pigmentation and vision. PLoS Genetics 1(5): e63　

Book Chapters

1. José M. Ranz, Shu-Dan Yeh, Kevin G. Nyberg, and Carlos A. Machado. 2013. Transcriptome Profiling of Drosophila  Interspecific Hybrids: Insights into Mechanisms of Regulatory Divergence and Hybrid Dysfunction. In Polyploid and Hybrid Genomics. Edited by Z. Jeffery Chen and James A. Birchler. John Wiley & Sons. Inc.

Graduate courses (taught in English)

1. Evolutionary Biology
2. Molecular Cell Biology (co-teaching)
3. Biotechnology I (co-teaching)
4. Advanced Cellular and Molecular Biology (co-teaching)

Undergraduate courses (taught in Mandarin Chinese)

1. Insect world
2. Genetics (co-teaching)
3. General Biology for LS major (co-teaching)
4. General Biology for non-LS major (co-teaching)